Moral objectivism across the lifespan

Abstract

We report the results of a cross-sectional study that examined folk metaethical judgments in participants between the ages of 12 and 88. We found that participants in their late teens and early twenties attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than participants in older or younger age groups. We also critically examine other recent investigations of folk metaethical intuitions and compare our results to certain well-known findings in the moral development literature.keywords: moral psychology, metaethics, objectivism, subjectivism, relativism Philosophers have long assumed that the vast majority of ordinary people are unrestricted moral objectivists-i.e., that they take moral claims to be objectively true or false and to apply to all people regardless of culture. For example, J. L. Mackie (1977, 33) famously claimed:The ordinary user of moral language means to say something about whatever it is that he characterizes morally, for example a possible action, as it is in itself… and not about, or even simply expressive of, his, or anyone else's, attitude or relation to it… one that is absolute, not contingent upon any desire or preference or policy or choice. 2More recently, Michael Smith (1994, 6, 84) has argued that "we seem to think moral questions have correct answers; that the correct answers are made correct by objective moral facts." and that "it is a platitude that our moral judgements at least purport to be objective."1 Despite the prevalence of these claims within the philosophical community 2 , however, the fact remains that they lack any empirical basis. 2 Similar claims can be found in Brink (1989) and Darwall (1998). 3(forthcoming) found that not only is there significant diversity among individuals with regard to the objectivity they attribute to ethical claims; there is also significant diversity of opinion with respect to whether individuals take certain issues such as abortion or anonymously donating money to charity to be ethical issues at all, despite the fact that philosophers overwhelmingly regard these issues as ethical.In the present article we report the results of a study that contributes to this growing body of empirically-based investigations of folk metaethical judgments. The two primary motivations for our project are that existing studies of folk metaethical judgments almost always employ problematic measures of moral objectivism and do not sample from a wide range of age groups.We show that individuals in their late teens and twenties often question or reject moral objectivism to a greater extent than at any other time in their lives. Before reporting the results of our study, we first review some of the difficulties and limitations of other studies of folk moral objectivism and explain how we attempted to overcome them in our own. Background and MotivationAs is well known, philosophers divide the field of ethics into metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. (1.5) Are there moral facts, and if so, how do these facts compare to scientific facts? Goodwin and Darley (...

Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics

“…A number of existing studies have explored people's intuitions about the conditions under which moral claims have exclusionary content (Beebe & Sackris , Fisher et al . forthcoming, Goodwin & Darley , , Nichols , Sarkissian et al .…”

How Different Kinds of Disagreement Impact Folk Metaethical Judgments

“…Further research is required to determine whether it is concreteness or other social factors that push individuals in the direction of greater objectivism. The studies reported above show that not only are there differences in folk metaethical judgments that track the content of ethical claims (Goodwin & Darley, 2008;Beebe & Sackris, under review; Study 1), how contested they are (Goodwin & Darley, 2012;Study 2), and the cultural distance between disagreeing parties (Sarkissian et al, 2011); there are also differences that track the goodness or badness of disagreeing parties (Study 5) and possibly their concreteness as well (Studies 3 and 4). It is hoped that the present research sheds useful light on the multi-dimensional variation that characterizes the folk metaethical landscape.…”

Norms, not moral norms: The boundaries of morality do not matter

“…In this approach, responses are deemed “objectivist” when participants judge that, in cases of disagreement, at least one party to the disagreement must be wrong; conflicting claims cannot both be correct. These studies consistently show that very few people give objectivist responses on aesthetic matters, and people are much more likely to be objectivist about putatively moral issues (Beebe & Sackris 2016; Goodwin & Darley 2008; 2012; Wright et al 2013). (Unfortunately, none of these studies has examined objectivism for epistemic matters.)…”